L'Eleve de la Nature

A Amsterdam, & se trouve a Paris, Chez Panckoucker..., 1766. 2 volumes in 1. 12mo, 163 x 93 mms., pp. iv, 202; [ii], 139 [140 blank], contemporary lightly mottled sheepskin, spine richly gilt, red leather label; top of spine and joints slightly wormed, but a good copy with the bookplate of Payen de Chavoy on the front paste-down end-paper, and the autograph dated 1767 on the top margin of each title-page (closely trimmed by binder, partially removing upper portions of letters.) Jean Bloch in "Gaspard Guillard de Beaurieu's L'Eleve de la Nature and Rousseau's Emile" (French Studies, July, 1972), that "little has been heard of Gaspard Guillard de Beaurieu's L'Eleve de la Nature and its relationship to Rousseau's Emile since Emile Legouis's Taylorian Lecture of 1925. Yet, despite its obvious naivete of detail, its sentimentality and exaggeration, de Beaurieu's book holds what would appear to be a unique position among the host of those which discuss or imitate Emile in France before the Revolution. L'Eleve de la Nature alone consciously adopts not only the dual formation of Emile, that of the natural man destined for society, but also Rousseau's method of achieving this, though de Beaurieu does it in a grossly exaggerated and transformed manner�.... A novel rather than a pedagogical treatise, it deals much more comprehensively with Rousseau's system than Poncelet's and Formey's comments of the same year do. L'Eleve de la Nature is outstanding in that it consciously adopts the double education of Emile. This may simply be the result of copying Emile fairly closely, but it nevertheless produces an interpretation of Emile that is very different from other pre-revolutionary interpretations. In the Preface to the 1766 edition (the book went through eight separate editions between 1766 and 1794), the libraire states that the system of education put forward in the book has two goals, the first to form 'un honnete homme heureux par lui-meme' and the second to 'rendre cet honnete homme encore plus heureux, en en faisant un bon citoyen'."